The digital-connected home is ubiquitous, and consumers today have high expectations for the kind of services they can get in their connected homes. The growth of digital services in the home has been primarily aimed at enabling connection of devices to a single local area network (LAN), and service providers deliver services into the home from outside the LAN to the devices connected to the LAN.
The primary premise for this model of providing services in the home is that service providers will be able to provide all the services needed in the home over a network. This model may be valid now; however, many factors hinder service providers from providing a full range of services to the home given this model. For example, the innumerable configurations across different systems and network devices in the home pose huge challenges for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and service providers to provide connectivity for receiving services. The connectivity problem also applies across software applications that may or may not have application program interfaces (APIs) for exchanging information with service providers. Generally, as more and more services are desired in the home, and with the explosion of different types of devices having different capabilities, as well as different interfaces, the full range of possible service scenarios may not be supportable by service providers outside the home.
In addition many of the services made available through service providers, for example, over the Internet or via a service provider network, are not customizable by the user or have a minimal number of settings that can be changed by the user. Thus, users are restricted by the type of available services and by the capabilities of their devices to be used to receive and administer the services.